ISCHE 39 in Buenos Aires ended a few short weeks ago with a final excursion to the Parque de la Memoria. This was only one of many rich and thought-provoking moments during the conference, which all of us will remember. But alongside that plunge into the history of Argentina there was the beauty of the city, cultural excursions to visit schools and libraries, tango lessons, music and dancing and barbeque at the banquet, and an opening and closing ceremony to the rhythms of Argentinian music. Like always, ISCHE was an opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones, to discover new research agendas and to appreciate the vitality of our multilingual community. A new feature of the conference was an Executive committee-organized panel on “The rise of new populisms”, intended to provoke debate and discussion, which indeed it did. We look forward to pursuing this initiative in Berlin for ISCHE’s 40th anniversary. During the General Assembly, we elected two new executive committee members, Angelo Van Gorp who is about to join the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany and Diana Vidal from São Paolo University in Brazil who had been serving on the EC as a co-opted member. Many thanks to Grace Akanbi whose term has ended and to Inês Felix who has done so much to make the website useful for Early Career Researchers. Since the GA, Inês has accepted to join the EC as the co-opted early career researcher. For those who couldn’t make it to the conference, the abstract booklet is on line. The package of documents about the GA are also available.

I would now to give you some information about ISCHE’s projects.

1) We announced at the General Assembly that we are working on an ISCHE conference abstract database. We were very fortunate to receive funding for this initiative from the Stichting-PH. This will allow members to search previous years’ meetings using a variety of search techniques, discover what people have been working on in order to find like-minded scholars for comparative panels.

2) The General Assembly also gave us the opportunity honor to praise Damiano Matasci for winning the ISCHE 2017 First Book Award for his first monograph L’école républicaine et l’étranger. Une histoire internationale des réformes scolaires en France, 1870-1914 (Paris, ENS Editions) published in 2015. Many thanks to the book committee for their hard work. Submissions for the ISCHE 2018 FIRST Book Award are now open, with the nomination process ending on September 1, 2017. Please check the website for more information and circulate the information to early career researchers. Books published in one of the four ISCHE languages (English, Spanish, French or German) in 2016 and before September 2017 are eligible.

3) Early Career Researchers who attended the conference should think about submitting their conference paper for the Early Career Conference Paper Award. The deadline for such submissions are October 1, 2017. The GA was also the moment when we announced the winner of the 2017 award: Kristen Chmielewski, University of Iowa for her paper “‘Hopelessly Insane, Some Almost Maniacs:’ New York City’s War on ‘Unfit’ Teachers”.

4) All ISCHE members should also consider sending their book proposals to the ISCHE book series, Global Histories of Education (Palgrave Macmillan). The first volumes should appear in 2018, and we look forward to receiving manuscripts over the next year. More information on this book series is available here:

5) In 2017 the EC launched the ISCHE History of Education Salon initiative with four short and stimulating videos on the topic “Education and the Body”. Ideal for teaching, this video initiative will continue in 2017-2018 and we will shortly be reaching out to members of Standing Working Groups for proposals to make similar videos available on line—if you are a regular member of a SWG, start thinking about topics you would like to explore in this sort of international and multilingual setting! View the first videos here.

6) The call for papers for ISCHE 40 in Germany (27 August-1 September 2018) will shortly be available on the website. Keep your eyes open for this. We will pursue the initiative begun this year to offer travel bursaries to a number of early career researchers to attend the meeting. Information about the possibilities of applying for these bursaries will be made available after announcement that papers have been accepted mid-April 2018. We will shortly have feedback from the first bursaries available on line.

I want to close by reminding all of you that ISCHE’s ability to offer travel funding (both to the annual conference and to the History of Education Summer school), to create videos, and to make available a database of conference abstracts depends on your membership contributions. Taylor and Francis will begin reminding you of the need to renew your membership in the fall—please respond promptly and remind scholars around you of the importance of being an ISCHE member so make our association truly a global association.

For those of you who are in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the end of the summer, and to all of you enjoy the rest of 2017 and start thinking about how you might add your voice to the discussion about “Nature and Education” in Berlin next August.